Page 45 - Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

Aer you stumble upon an unexpected reward, you alter your strateg y

for next time. Your brain immediately beg ins to catalog the events that
preceded the reward. Wait a minute—t hat felt good. What did I do right
before that?
is is the feedback loop behind all human behavior : tr y, fail, learn, tr y

differently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the usef ul
actions get reinforced. at’s a habit forming.
Whenever you face a problem rep eatedly, your brain beg ins to automate
the process of solving it. Your habits are just a ser ies of automatic solutions

that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly. As behavioral
scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to
recurring problems in our environment.”
As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases. You learn

to lock in on the cues that predict success and tune out ever ything else.
When a similar situation arises in the future, you know exactly what to look
for. ere is no longer a need to analyze ever y angle of a situation. Your
brain skips the process of trial and er ror and creates a mental rule: if this,

then that. es e cognitive scripts can be followed automatically whenever
the situation is appropriate. Now, whenever you feel stressed, you get the
itch to run. As soon as you walk in the door from work, you grab the video
game controller. A choice that once required e ort is now automatic. A habit

has been created.
Habits are mental shortcuts learned from exper ience. In a sense, a habit is
just a memor y of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the
past. Whenever the conditions are right, you can draw on this memor y and

automatically apply the same solution. e primar y reason the brain
remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future.
Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the
bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time.

As a result, your brain is always working to pres er ve your conscious
attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the
conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do
automatically. is is precisely what happens when a habit is formed. Habits

reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your
attention to other tasks.